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Purpose. Age can be an important clue in uncovering the identity of persons that left biological evidence at crime scenes. With the availability of DNA methylation data, several age prediction models are developed by using statistical and machine learning methods. From epigenetic studies, it has been demonstrated that there is a close association between aging and DNA methylation. Most of the existing studies focused on healthy samples, whereas diseases may have a significant impact on human age. Therefore, in this article, an age prediction model is proposed using DNA methylation biomarkers for healthy and diseased samples. Methods. The dataset contains 454 healthy samples and 400 diseased samples from publicly available sources with age (1–89 years old). Six CpG sites are identified from this data having a high correlation with age using Pearson's correlation coefficient. In this work, the age prediction model is developed using four different machine learning techniques, namely, Multiple Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, Gradient Boosting Regression, and Random Forest Regression. Separate models are designed for healthy and diseased data. The data are split randomly into 80 : 20 ratios for training and testing, respectively. Results. Among all the techniques, the model designed using Random Forest Regression shows the best performance, and Gradient Boosting Regression is the second best model. In the case of healthy samples, the model achieved a MAD of 2.51 years for training data and 4.85 for testing data. Also, for diseased samples, a MAD of 3.83 years is obtained for training and 9.53 years for testing. Conclusion. These results showed that the proposed model can predict age for healthy and diseased samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent advancement in the medical diagnostic tools, multi-modality medical images are extensively utilized as a lifesaving tool. An efficient fusion of medical images can improve the performance of various medical diagnostic tools. But, gathering of all modalities for a given patient is defined as an ill-posed problem as medical images suffer from poor visibility and frequent patient dropout. Therefore, in this paper, an efficient multi-modality image fusion model is proposed to fuse multi-modality medical images. To tune the hyper-parameters of the proposed model, a multi-objective differential evolution is used. The fusion factor and edge strength metrics are utilized to form a multi-objective fitness function. Performance of the proposed model is compared with nine competitive models over fifteen benchmark images. Performance analyses reveal that the proposed model outperforms the competitive fusion models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gurumukhi script has a complex structure for which text recognition based on an analytical approach can misinterpret the script. For error-free results in text recognition, the author has proposed a holistic approach based on classification of Gurumukhi month's name images. For this, a new convolutional neural model has been developed for automatic feature extraction from Gurumukhi text images. The proposed convolutional neural network is designed with five convolutional, three polling layers, one flatten layer and one dense layer. To validate the results of the proposed model, the dataset was self-created from 500 distinct writers. The performance of the model has been analyzed with 100 epochs, 40 batch sizes and different optimizers. The various optimizers that have been used for this experimentation are SGD, Adagrad, Adadelta, RMSprop, Adam, and Nadam. The experimental results show that the proposed CNN model performed best with Adam optimizer in terms of accuracy, computational time, F1 score, precision and recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hurricanes are tropical storms that cause immense damage to human life and property. Rapid assessment of damage caused by hurricanes is extremely important for the first responders. But this process is usually slow, expensive, labor intensive and prone to errors. The advancements in remote sensing and computer vision help in observing Earth at a different scale. In this paper, a new Convolutional Neural Network model has been designed with the help of satellite images captured from the areas affected by hurricanes. The model will be able to assess the damage by detecting damaged and undamaged buildings based upon which the relief aid can be provided to the affected people on an immediate basis. The model is composed of five convolutional layers, five pooling layers, one flattening layer, one dropout layer and two dense layers. Hurricane Harvey dataset consisting of 23,000 images of size 128 × 128 pixels has been used in this paper. The proposed model is simulated on 5750 test images at a learning rate of 0.00001 and 30 epochs with the Adam optimizer obtaining an accuracy of 0.95 and precision of 0.97. The proposed model will help the emergency responders to determine whether there has been damage or not due to the hurricane and also help those to provide relief aid to the affected people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chest X-ray (CXR) scans are emerging as an important diagnostic tool for the early spotting of COVID and other significant lung diseases. The recognition of visual symptoms is difficult and can take longer time by radiologists as CXR provides various signs of viral infection. Therefore, artificial intelligence-based method for automated identification of COVID by utilizing X-ray images has been found to be very promising. In the era of deep learning, effective utilization of existing pretrained generalized models is playing a decisive role in terms of time and accuracy. In this paper, the benefits of weights of existing pretrained model VGG16 and InceptionV3 have been taken. Base model has been created using pretrained models (VGG16 and InceptionV3). The last fully connected (FC) layer has been added as per the number of classes for classification of CXR in binary and multi-class classification by appropriately using transfer learning. Finally, combination of layers is made by integrating the FC layer weights of both the models (VGG16 and InceptionV3). The image dataset used for experimentation consists of healthy, COVID, pneumonia viral, and pneumonia bacterial. The proposed weight fusion method has outperformed the existing models in terms of accuracy, achieved 99.5% accuracy in binary classification over 20 epochs, and 98.2% accuracy in three-class classification over 100 epochs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast cancer is a global cause for concern owing to its high incidence around the world. The alarming increase in breast cancer cases emphasizes the management of disease at multiple levels. The management should start from the beginning that includes stringent cancer screening or cancer registry to effective diagnostic and treatment strategies. Breast cancer is highly heterogeneous at morphology as well as molecular levels and needs different therapeutic regimens based on the molecular subtype. Breast cancer patients with respective subtype have different clinical outcome prognoses. Breast cancer heterogeneity emphasizes the advanced molecular testing that will help on-time diagnosis and improved survival. Emerging fields such as liquid biopsy and artificial intelligence would help to under the complexity of breast cancer disease and decide the therapeutic regimen that helps in breast cancer management. In this review, we have discussed various risk factors and advanced technology available for breast cancer diagnosis to combat the worst breast cancer status and areas that need to be focused for the better management of breast cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image captioning provides the visual information of medical images in the form of natural language. It requires an efficient approach to understand and evaluate the similarity between visual and textual elements and to generate a sequence of output words. A novel show, attend, and tell model (ATM) is implemented, which considers a visual attention approach using an encoder-decoder model. But the show, attend, and tell model is sensitive to its initial parameters. Therefore, a Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm-II (SPEA-II) is utilized to optimize the initial parameters of the ATM. Finally, experiments are considered using the benchmark data sets and competitive medical image captioning techniques. Performance analysis shows that the SPEA-II-based ATM performs significantly better as compared to the existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pneumothorax is a thoracic disease leading to failure of the respiratory system, cardiac arrest, or in extreme cases, death. Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is the primary diagnostic imaging technique for the diagnosis of pneumothorax. A computerized diagnosis system can detect pneumothorax in chest radiographic images, which provide substantial benefits in disease diagnosis. In the present work, a deep learning neural network model is proposed to detect the regions of pneumothoraces in the chest X-ray images. The model incorporates a Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Mask RCNN) framework and transfer learning with ResNet101 as a backbone feature pyramid network (FPN). The proposed model was trained on a pneumothorax dataset prepared by the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine in association with American college of Radiology (SIIM-ACR). The present work compares the operation of the proposed MRCNN model based on ResNet101 as an FPN with the conventional model based on ResNet50 as an FPN. The proposed model had lower class loss, bounding box loss, and mask loss as compared to the conventional model based on ResNet50 as an FPN. Both models were simulated with a learning rate of 0.0004 and 0.0006 with 10 and 12 epochs, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image captioning provides the visual information of medical images in the form of natural language. It requires an efficient approach to understand and evaluate the similarity between visual and textual elements and to generate a sequence of output words. A novel show, attend, and tell model (ATM) is implemented, which considers a visual attention approach using an encoder-decoder model. But the show, attend, and tell model is sensitive to its initial parameters. Therefore, a Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm-II (SPEA-II) is utilized to optimize the initial parameters of the ATM. Finally, experiments are considered using the benchmark data sets and competitive medical image captioning techniques. Performance analysis shows that the SPEA-II-based ATM performs significantly better as compared to the existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pulmonary fibrosis is a severe chronic lung disease that causes irreversible scarring in the tissues of the lungs, which results in the loss of lung capacity. The Forced Vital Capacity (FVC) of the patient is an interesting measure to investigate this disease to have the prognosis of the disease. This paper proposes a deep learning-based FVC-Net architecture to predict the progression of the disease from the patient's computed tomography (CT) scan and the patient's metadata. The input to the model combines the image score generated based on the degree of honeycombing for a patient identified based on segmented lung images and the metadata. This input is then fed to a 3-layer net to obtain the final output. The performance of the proposed FVC-Net model is compared with various contemporary state-of-the-art deep learning-based models, which are available on a cohort from the pulmonary fibrosis progression dataset. The model showcased significant improvement in the performance over other models for modified Laplace Log-Likelihood (−6.64). Finally, the paper concludes with some prospects to be explored in the proposed study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most generally known neurodegenerative disorder, leading to a steady deterioration in cognitive ability. Deep learning models have shown outstanding performance in the diagnosis of AD, and these models do not need any handcrafted feature extraction over conventional machine learning algorithms. Since the 2012 AlexNet accomplishment, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has been progressively utilized by the medical community to assist practitioners to early diagnose AD. This paper explores the current cutting edge applications of CNN on single and multimodality (combination of two or more modalities) neuroimaging data for the classification of AD. An exhaustive systematic search is conducted on four notable databases: Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and PubMed in June 2021. The objective of this study is to examine the effectiveness of classification approaches on AD to analyze different kinds of datasets, neuroimaging modalities, preprocessing techniques, and data handling methods. However, CNN has achieved great success in the classification of AD; still, there are a lot of challenges particularly due to scarcity of medical imaging data and its possible scope in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esophageal carcinoma (EsC) is a member of the cancer group that occurs in the esophagus; globally, it is known as one of the fatal malignancies. In this study, we used gene expression analysis to identify molecular biomarkers to propose therapeutic targets for the development of novel drugs. We consider EsC associated four different microarray datasets from the gene expression omnibus database. Statistical analysis is performed using R language and identified a total of 1083 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in which 380 are overexpressed and 703 are underexpressed. The functional study is performed with the identified DEGs to screen significant Gene Ontology (GO) terms and associated pathways using the Database for Annotation, Visualization, and Integrated Discovery repository (DAVID). The analysis revealed that the overexpressed DEGs are principally connected with the protein export, axon guidance pathway, and the downexpressed DEGs are principally connected with the L13a-mediated translational silencing of ceruloplasmin expression, formation of a pool of free 40S subunits pathway. The STRING database used to collect protein-protein interaction (PPI) network information and visualize it with the Cytoscape software. We found 10 hub genes from the PPI network considering three methods in which the interleukin 6 (IL6) gene is the top in all methods. From the PPI, we found that identified clusters are associated with the complex I biogenesis, ubiquitination and proteasome degradation, signaling by interleukins, and Notch-HLH transcription pathway. The identified biomarkers and pathways may play an important role in the future for developing drugs for the EsC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are a big data which are frequently corrupted by motion artifacts. As human neural diseases, diagnosis and analysis need a robust neurological signal. Consequently, the EEG artifacts' eradication is a vital step. In this research paper, the primary motion artifact is detected from a single-channel EEG signal using support vector machine (SVM) and preceded with further artifacts' suppression. The signal features' abstraction and further detection are done through ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. Moreover, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) filtering approach is applied for motion artifact removal. Finally, leftover motion artifacts' unpredictability is removed by applying wavelet transform (WT) algorithm. Finally, results are optimized by using Harris hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm. The results of the assessment confirm that the algorithm recommended is superior to the algorithms currently in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generation Z is a data-driven generation. Everyone has the entirety of humanity's knowledge in their hands. The technological possibilities are endless. However, we use and misuse this blessing to face swap using deepfake. Deepfake is an emerging subdomain of artificial intelligence technology in which one person's face is overlaid over another person's face, which is very prominent across social media. Machine learning is the main element of deepfakes, and it has allowed deepfake images and videos to be generated considerably faster and at a lower cost. Despite the negative connotations associated with the phrase "deepfakes," the technology is being more widely employed commercially and individually. Although it is relatively new, the latest technological advances make it more and more challenging to detect deepfakes and synthesized images from real ones. An increasing sense of unease has developed around the emergence of deepfake technologies. Our main objective is to detect deepfake images from real ones accurately. In this research, we implemented several methods to detect deepfake images and make a comparative analysis. Our model was trained by datasets from Kaggle, which had 70,000 images from the Flickr dataset and 70,000 images produced by styleGAN. For this comparative study of the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to identify genuine and deepfake pictures, we trained eight different CNN models. Three of these models were trained using the DenseNet architecture (DenseNet121, DenseNet169, and DenseNet201); two were trained using the VGGNet architecture (VGG16, VGG19); one was with the ResNet50 architecture, one with the VGGFace, and one with a bespoke CNN architecture. We have also implemented a custom model that incorporates methods like dropout and padding that aid in determining whether or not the other models reflect their objectives. The results were categorized by five evaluation metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve. Amongst all the models, VGGFace performed the best, with 99% accuracy. Besides, we obtained 97% from the ResNet50, 96% from the DenseNet201, 95% from the DenseNet169, 94% from the VGG19, 92% from the VGG16, 97% from the DenseNet121 model, and 90% from the custom model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data is the key to measuring educational effectiveness promptly. But data and education are trapped and siloed across centralized systems, causing information discrepancies and inaccuracies. This has caused countless delayed opportunities, academic credential disagreements, and never-ending confusion around learning potency. This lack of transparency, despite having its fair share of usefulness, has also been quite burdensome. To alleviate this issue, our team has developed a blockchain protocol that verifies professional certifications that have been earned both locally and through another well-established online educational portal. This system allows accuracy, reliability, and immutability that has never been implemented. This foundation of clear, verified data will then be used further to power blockchain-based applications. The result is that our attempt at a versatile, holistic, and decentralized view of educational performance ensures the best e-learning outcome for students and teachers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suspended sediment load (SSL) estimation is essential for both short- and long-term water resources management. Suspended sediments are taken into account as an important factor of the service life of hydraulic structures such as dams. The aim of this research is to estimat SSL by coupling intrinsic time-scale decomposition (ITD) and two kinds of DDM, namely evolutionary polynomial regression (EPR) and model tree (MT) DDMs, at the Sarighamish and Varand Stations in Iran. Measured data based on their lag times are decomposed into several proper rotation components (PRCs) and a residual, which are then considered as inputs for the proposed model. Results indicate that the prediction accuracy of ITD-EPR is the best for both the Sarighamish (R2 = 0.92 and WI = 0.96) and Varand (R2 = 0.92 and WI = 0.93) Stations (WI is the Willmott index of agreement), while a standalone MT model performs poorly for these stations compared with other approaches (EPR, ITD-EPR and ITD-MT) although peak SSL values are approximately equal to those by ITD-EPR. Results of the proposed models are also compared with those of the sediment rating curve (SRC) method. The ITD-EPR predictions are remarkably superior to those by the SRC method with respect to several conventional performance evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcoholism is attributed to regular or excessive drinking of alcohol and leads to the disturbance of the neuronal system in the human brain. This results in certain malfunctioning of neurons that can be detected by an electroencephalogram (EEG) using several electrodes on a human skull at appropriate positions. It is of great interest to be able to classify an EEG activity as that of a normal person or an alcoholic person using data from the minimum possible electrodes (or channels). Due to the complex nature of EEG signals, accurate classification of alcoholism using only a small dataset is a challenging task. Artificial neural networks, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), provide efficient and accurate results in various pattern-based classification problems. In this work, we apply CNN on raw EEG data and demonstrate how we achieved 98% average accuracy by optimizing a baseline CNN model and outperforming its results in a range of performance evaluation metrics on the University of California at Irvine Machine Learning (UCI-ML) EEG dataset. This article explains the stepwise improvement of the baseline model using the dropout, batch normalization, and kernel regularization techniques and provides a comparison of the two models that can be beneficial for aspiring practitioners who aim to develop similar classification models in CNN. A performance comparison is also provided with other approaches using the same dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are a big data which are frequently corrupted by motion artifacts. As human neural diseases, diagnosis and analysis need a robust neurological signal. Consequently, the EEG artifacts' eradication is a vital step. In this research paper, the primary motion artifact is detected from a single-channel EEG signal using support vector machine (SVM) and preceded with further artifacts' suppression. The signal features' abstraction and further detection are done through ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. Moreover, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) filtering approach is applied for motion artifact removal. Finally, leftover motion artifacts' unpredictability is removed by applying wavelet transform (WT) algorithm. Finally, results are optimized by using Harris hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm. The results of the assessment confirm that the algorithm recommended is superior to the algorithms currently in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is facing a pandemic due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), named as per the World Health Organization. COVID-19 is caused by the virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was initially discovered in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Later, the virus had spread throughout the world within a few months. COVID-19 has become a global health crisis because millions of people worldwide are affected by this fatal virus. Fever, dry cough, and gastrointestinal problems are the most common signs of COVID-19. The disease is highly contagious, and affected people can easily spread the virus to those with whom they have close contact. Thus, contact tracing is a suitable solution to prevent the virus from spreading. The method of identifying all persons with whom a COVID-19-affected patient has come into contact in the last 2 weeks is called contact tracing. This study presents an investigation of a convolutional neural network (CNN), which makes the test faster and more reliable, to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images. Because there are many studies in this field, the designed model focuses on increasing the accuracy level and uses a transfer learning approach and a custom model. Pretrained deep CNN models, such as VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50, have been used for deep feature extraction. The performance measurement in this study was based on classification accuracy. The results of this study indicate that deep learning can recognize SARS-CoV-2 from CXR images. The designed model provided 93% accuracy and 98% validation accuracy, and the pretrained customized models such as MobileNetV2 obtained 97% accuracy, InceptionV3 obtained 98%, and VGG16 obtained 98% accuracy, respectively. Among these models, InceptionV3 has recorded the highest accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are a big data which are frequently corrupted by motion artifacts. As human neural diseases, diagnosis and analysis need a robust neurological signal. Consequently, the EEG artifacts' eradication is a vital step. In this research paper, the primary motion artifact is detected from a single-channel EEG signal using support vector machine (SVM) and preceded with further artifacts' suppression. The signal features' abstraction and further detection are done through ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. Moreover, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) filtering approach is applied for motion artifact removal. Finally, leftover motion artifacts' unpredictability is removed by applying wavelet transform (WT) algorithm. Finally, results are optimized by using Harris hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm. The results of the assessment confirm that the algorithm recommended is superior to the algorithms currently in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are a big data which are frequently corrupted by motion artifacts. As human neural diseases, diagnosis and analysis need a robust neurological signal. Consequently, the EEG artifacts' eradication is a vital step. In this research paper, the primary motion artifact is detected from a single-channel EEG signal using support vector machine (SVM) and preceded with further artifacts' suppression. The signal features' abstraction and further detection are done through ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. Moreover, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) filtering approach is applied for motion artifact removal. Finally, leftover motion artifacts' unpredictability is removed by applying wavelet transform (WT) algorithm. Finally, results are optimized by using Harris hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm. The results of the assessment confirm that the algorithm recommended is superior to the algorithms currently in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most important causes of mortality in elderly people, and it is often challenging to use traditional manual procedures when diagnosing a disease in the early stages. The successful implementation of machine learning (ML) techniques has also shown their effectiveness and its reliability as one of the better options for an early diagnosis of AD. But the heterogeneous dimensions and composition of the disease data have undoubtedly made diagnostics more difficult, needing a sufficient model choice to overcome the difficulty. Therefore, in this paper, four different 2D and 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) frameworks based on Bayesian search optimization are proposed to develop an optimized deep learning model to predict the early onset of AD binary and ternary classification on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Moreover, certain hyperparameters such as learning rate, optimizers, and hidden units are to be set and adjusted for the performance boosting of the deep learning model. Bayesian optimization enables to leverage advantage throughout the experiments: A persistent hyperparameter space testing provides not only the output but also about the nearest conclusions. In this way, the series of experiments needed to explore space can be substantially reduced. Finally, alongside the use of Bayesian approaches, long short-term memory (LSTM) through the process of augmentation has resulted in finding the better settings of the model that too in less iterations with an relative improvement (RI) of 7.03%, 12.19%, 10.80%, and 11.99% over the four systems optimized with manual hyperparameters tuning such that hyperparameters that look more appealing from past data as well as the conventional techniques of manual selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacture of raw materials to deliver the product to the consumer in a traditional supply chain system is a manual process with insufficient data and transaction security. It also takes a significant amount of time, making the entire procedure lengthy. Overall, the undivided process is ineffective and untrustworthy for consumers. If blockchain and smart contract technologies are integrated into traditional supply chain management systems, data security, authenticity, time management, and transaction processes will all be significantly improved. Blockchain is a revolutionary, decentralized technology that protects data from unauthorized access. The entire supply chain management (SCM) will be satisfied with the consumer once smart contracts are implemented. The plan becomes more trustworthy when the mediator is contracted, which is doable in these ways. The tags employed in the conventional SCM process are costly and have limited possibilities. As a result, it is difficult to maintain product secrecy and accountability in the SCM scheme. It is also a common target for wireless attacks (reply attacks, eavesdropping, etc.). In SCM, the phrase "product confidentiality" is very significant. It means that only those who have been validated have access to the information. This paper emphasizes reducing the involvement of third parties in the supply chain system and improving data security. Traditional supply chain management systems have a number of significant flaws. Lack of traceability, difficulty maintaining product safety and quality, failure to monitor and control inventory in warehouses and shops, rising supply chain expenses, and so on, are some of them. The focus of this paper is on minimizing third-party participation in the supply chain system and enhancing data security. This improves accessibility, efficiency, and timeliness throughout the whole process. The primary advantage is that individuals will feel safer throughout the payment process. However, in this study, a peer-to-peer encrypted system was utilized in conjunction with a smart contract. Additionally, there are a few other features. Because this document makes use of an immutable ledger, the hacker will be unable to get access to it. Even if they get access to the system, they will be unable to modify any data. If the goods are defective, the transaction will be halted, and the customer will be reimbursed, with the seller receiving the merchandise. By using cryptographic methods, transaction security will be a feasible alternative for recasting these issues. Finally, this paper will demonstrate how to maintain the method with the maximum level of safety, transparency, and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is facing a pandemic due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), named as per the World Health Organization. COVID-19 is caused by the virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was initially discovered in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Later, the virus had spread throughout the world within a few months. COVID-19 has become a global health crisis because millions of people worldwide are affected by this fatal virus. Fever, dry cough, and gastrointestinal problems are the most common signs of COVID-19. The disease is highly contagious, and affected people can easily spread the virus to those with whom they have close contact. Thus, contact tracing is a suitable solution to prevent the virus from spreading. The method of identifying all persons with whom a COVID-19-affected patient has come into contact in the last 2 weeks is called contact tracing. This study presents an investigation of a convolutional neural network (CNN), which makes the test faster and more reliable, to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images. Because there are many studies in this field, the designed model focuses on increasing the accuracy level and uses a transfer learning approach and a custom model. Pretrained deep CNN models, such as VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50, have been used for deep feature extraction. The performance measurement in this study was based on classification accuracy. The results of this study indicate that deep learning can recognize SARS-CoV-2 from CXR images. The designed model provided 93% accuracy and 98% validation accuracy, and the pretrained customized models such as MobileNetV2 obtained 97% accuracy, InceptionV3 obtained 98%, and VGG16 obtained 98% accuracy, respectively. Among these models, InceptionV3 has recorded the highest accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Select the most significant features of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome patients. • Analyzed different machine learning procedures on the PCOS dataset. • Find the optimum set of parameters for the Random Forest classifier. • Achieved an overall classification accuracy of 93.25%. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a hormonal disorder that affects a large percentage of women of reproductive age. PCOS causes imbalanced or delayed menstrual cycles and produces high levels of the male hormone. The ovaries may create a significant number of little fluid-filled sacs (follicles) yet fail to discharge eggs regularly. The actual cause of PCOS is uncertain. However, early exposure and curing, as well as weight loss, may lower the threat of long-term complications. This study focuses on PCOS diagnosis based on a clinical dataset supplied by Kottarathil, accessible via its Kaggle repository. Non -invasive screening parameters are used to evaluate a range of machine learning approaches for screening PCOS patients without the use of invasive diagnostics. According to the findings of the experiments, the Random Forest (RF) method outperforms the other prominent machine learning algorithms with an accuracy of 93.25%. Further, the out-of-bag (OOB) error is utilized for assessing the prediction performance of RF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images captured by the cameras contain distortions, misclassified pixels, uncertainties and poor contrast. Therefore, the multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) integrates various input image features to produce a single fused image using all its objects in focus. However, it is computationally complex, which leads to inconsistency. Hence, the MFIF method is employed to generate the fused image by integrating the fuzzy sets (FS) and convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect focused and unfocused parts in both source images. It is also compared with other competing six MFIF methods like Neutrosophic set based stationary wavelet transform (NSWT), guided filters, CNN, ensemble CNN, image fusion-based CNN and deep regression pair learning (DRPL). Benchmark datasets validate the superiority of the proposed FCNN method in terms of four non-reference assessment measures having mutual information (1.1678), edge information (0.7281), structural similarity (0.9850) and human perception (0.8020) and two reference metrics such as Peak signal-to-noise ratio (57.23) and root mean square error (1.814). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grey wolf optimizer (GWO) is a widespread metaphor-based algorithm based on the enhanced variants of velocity-free particle swarm optimizer with proven defects and shortcomings in performance. Regardless of the proven defect and lack of novelty in this algorithm, the GWO has a simple algorithm and it may face considerable unbalanced exploration and exploitation trends. However, GWO is easy to be utilized, and it has a low capacity to deal with multi-modal functions, and it quickly falls into the optima trap or fails to find the global optimal solution. To improve the shortcomings of the basic GWO, this paper proposes an improved GWO called multi-stage grey wolf optimizer (MGWO). By dividing the search process into three stages and using different population updating strategies at each stage, the MGWO's optimization ability is improved while maintaining a certain convergence speed. The MGWO cannot easily fall into premature convergence and has a better ability to get rid of the local optima trap than GWO. Meanwhile, the MGWO achieves a better balance of exploration and exploitation and has a rough balance curve. Hence, the proposed MGWO can obtain a higher-quality solution. Based on verification on the thirty benchmark functions of IEEE CEC2017 as the objective functions, the simulation experiments in which MGWO compared with some swarm-based optimization algorithms and the balance and diversity analysis were conducted. The results verify the effectiveness and superiority of MGWO. Finally, the MGWO was applied to the multi-threshold image segmentation of Leaf Spot Diseases on Maize at four different threshold levels. The segmentation results were analysed by comparing each comparative algorithm's PSNR, SSIM, and FSIM. The results proved that the MGWO has noticeable competitiveness, and it can be used as an effective optimizer for multi-threshold image segmentation. • An improved multi-stage grey wolf optimizer (MGWO) is proposed. • The multi-stage strategy is used to balance exploration and exploitation. • A part of salp swarm algorithm strategy is introduced into GWO. • The greater performance of MGWO is verified over some advanced algorithms. • MGWO is tested on multi-threshold image segmentation of Leaf Spot Diseases on Maize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, the proactive diagnosis of diseases with artificial intelligence and its aligned technologies has been an exciting and fruitful area. One of the areas in medical care where constant monitoring is required is cardiovascular diseases. Arrhythmia, one of the cardiovascular diseases, is generally diagnosed by doctors using Electrocardiography (ECG), which records the heart's rhythm and electrical activity. The use of neural networks has been extensively adopted to identify abnormalities in the last few years. It is found that the probability of detecting arrhythmia increases if the denoised signal is used rather than the raw input signal. This paper compares six filters implemented on ECG signals to improve classification accuracy. Custom convolutional neural networks (CCNNs) are designed to filter ECG data. Extensive experiments are drawn by considering the six ECG filters and the proposed custom CCNN models. Comparative analysis reveals that the proposed models outperform the competitive models in various performance metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fused deposition modelling (FDM)-based 3D printing is a trending technology in the era of Industry 4.0 that manufactures products in layer-by-layer form. It shows remarkable benefits such as rapid prototyping, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and a sustainable manufacturing approach. Along with such advantages, a few defects occur in FDM products during the printing stage. Diagnosing defects occurring during 3D printing is a challenging task. Proper data acquisition and monitoring systems need to be developed for effective fault diagnosis. In this paper, the authors proposed a low-cost multi-sensor data acquisition system (DAQ) for detecting various faults in 3D printed products. The data acquisition system was developed using an Arduino micro-controller that collects real-time multi-sensor signals using vibration, current, and sound sensors. The different types of fault conditions are referred to introduce various defects in 3D products to analyze the effect of the fault conditions on the captured sensor data. Time and frequency domain analyses were performed on captured data to create feature vectors by selecting the chi-square method, and the most significant features were selected to train the CNN model. The K-means cluster algorithm was used for data clustering purposes, and the bell curve or normal distribution curve was used to define individual sensor threshold values under normal conditions. The CNN model was used to classify the normal and fault condition data, which gave an accuracy of around 94%, by evaluating the model performance based on recall, precision, and F1 score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart Home Architecture is suitable for progressive and symmetric urbanization. Data being generated in smart home appliances using internet of things should be stored in cloud where computing resources can analyze the data and generate the decisive pattern within no time. This additional requirement of storage, majorly, comprising of unfiltered data escalates requirement of host machines which carries with itself extra overhead of energy consumption; thus, extra cost has to be beard by service providers. Various static algorithms are already proposed to improve energy management of cloud data centers by reducing number of active bins. These algorithms are not able to cater to the needs of present heterogeneous requests generated in cloud machines by people of diversified work environment with adhering to the requirements of quality parameters. Therefore, the paper has proposed and implemented dynamic bin-packing approaches for smart architecture that can significantly reduce energy consumption without compromising upon makespan, resource utilization and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The novelty of the proposed dynamic approaches in comparison to the existing static approaches is that the proposed approach dynamically creates and dissolves virtual machines as per incoming and completed requests which is a dire need of present computing paradigms via attachment of time-frame with each virtual machine. The simulations have been performed on JAVA platform and dynamic energy utilized-best fit decreasing bin packing technique has produced better results in maximum runs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With new technologies coming to the market, the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the technologies that has gained exponential rise by facilitating Machine to Machine (M2M) communication and bringing smart devices closer to end users. By 2025, it is expected that IoT will bring together 78.4 billion of devices, thus improving the quality of life beyond our imagination; however, there are multiple potential challenges, such as the exploitation of energy consumption and the huge data traffic being generated by smart devices causing congestion and utilizing more bandwidth. Various researchers have provided an alternative to this problem by performing offloading of data, the task and computational requirements of an application at edge and fog nodes of IoT, thus helping to overcome latency issues for critical applications. Despite the importance of an offloading approach in IoT, there is need for a systematic, symmetric, comprehensive, and detailed survey in this field. This paper provides a systematic literature review (SLR) on data offloading approaches in IoT network at edge and fog nodes in the form of a classical taxonomy in order to recognize the state-of-the art mechanism(s) associated with this important topic and provide open consideration of issues as well. All of the research on classified offloading approaches done by researchers is compared with each other according to important factors such as performance metrics, utilized techniques, and evaluation tools, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, an efficient smart architecture-based framework is proposed to handle the symmetric data offloading issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]